Radio Interview #1 - Bacterial Infections Defy Treatment
1. What are Gram Stain Negative Bacteria? Are they harder to treat than other types of bacteria? it stands for Hans Christian Gram, who at the end of the 19th century invented a stain that we still use, and these bacteria that are so-called gram-stain negative have an extra membrane. So it makes it harder for antibiotics or anything to get into them. So they are hard to treat to start with, and then on top of that they have acquired all these many, many different resistances to antibiotics. So they are what we call multi-drug resistant, and they're hard to treat. That is not a good combination.
Gram-negative bacteria are bacteria which do not turn purple in the Gram staining process used as a basic step in the identification of bacteria.
Gram-negative bacteria will thus appear red or pink following a Gram stain procedure due to the effects of the counterstain (for example safranin).
2. Is antibiotic resistance a new phenomenon? What are two of the reasons that new drugs to combat resistance are not being developed?
Antibiotic resistance has been around since before there were human antibiotics, because bacteria invented antibiotics about two billion years ago, and they've been using antibiotics to kill each other and coming up with resistance mechanisms to defeat those antibiotics for two billion years. the pharmaceutical industry would just bail us out by coming out with the next generation of drugs to deal with the previously resistant bacteria, and that is not happening anymore,
The one reason is the economy, because the pharmaceutical industry. going to make a lot more money selling a drug that you have to take every day for the rest of your life - like a cholesterol, blood pressure, diabetes, arthritis - than a drug that you're going to take for seven days. the return on investment of antibiotics is just not competitive with many other classes of drugs.
The other reason the complexity of drug approval by FDA. The standardize, regulatory standard to prove drug, right now we don't know what the standards are, and companies don't know, academicians don't know. We don't know how to design clinical trials to meet regulatory standards to get drugs approved anymore.
3. What is MRSA? Is it found only in hospitals? If not, where else is it found?
Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) . MRSA was first seen in several countries in the 1960s. people are crowded together MRSA, as like other staph infections, is found on a persons skin or in their nose. ... The only time you can truly become affected buy it, is if it enters the body, usually through ... to the local health dept in the area you are if it was not gotten in a hospital. ... Ensure that it stays covered so that no one else can get infected. Even being around when someone is sneezing could potentially cause the spread of the disease. They call MRSA a Superbug because of how incredibly easy it is to spread the infection. By touching when people
MRSA's been known to be a hospital-associated infection since Methicillin resistance first showed itself in 1961. But since the late '90s, there's been a parallel, sort of overlapping second epidemic out in what medicine calls the community, which pretty much means anywhere outside the walls of a hospital or a nursing home, and just in the past couple of years there's been a surfacing third epidemic where the bug has taken residence in farm animals that are given lots of antibiotics.
on your clothes but on your skin or in the inside of your nose. And the CDC estimated a couple of years ago that probably one and a half percent of the U.S. population walks around with MRSA all the time.
one of the places where this seems to be sort of a risk factor is places where people are crowded together or where they have skin-to-skin contact or where they have sort of indifferent hygiene.
